The Need for Digital Marketing Education

In the recent blog “8 Predictions for SEO in 2012”, Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz predicted the rise of a serious certification program. I believe that there is a real need for our industry to identify and support a serious certification program; however, I have not seen any organization dedicated enough to establish themselves as an industry leader. Institutions of higher education need to start preparing their students for the “real world”. In my opinion, colleges and universities are doing a poor job of identifying opportunities to integrate traditional marketing knowledge and skills with today’s internet marketing environment.

There are several organizations that offer certification programs, but I am not sure that they can keep up with the changes or obtain a consensus between fact and fiction. Case in point: Several members of our team at DaBrian Marketing Group have taken courses provided by SEMPO Institute, but we have not been notified of what the latest updates were to the course information. As of February 21, the SEMPO Institute closed up shop for their certification program.

The colleges and universities need to introduce their students to internet marketing as a whole. Within the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, you will have a difficult time identifying colleges or universities that offer an internet marketing course as part of the undergraduate marketing curriculum. This extends to web design and development area of study, as graduates often lack basic SEO knowledge.

There is a serious need for education within our industry from the university level as well as alternative methods. Even as an adjunct professor, I don’t expect a student to be an SEO expert, but I would expect them to know the marketing fundamentals for an online marketing campaign. At the same time, internet marketing is not just SEO, PPC, and Social Media. We need to align the traditional concepts to internet marketing beyond business or marketing. These concepts should be accessible to IT graduates as well. Internet Marketing is not just for marketing people anymore, but it’s now IT, Public Relations and Math. We need to start demonstrating the crossover of these disciplines within our industry. It starts with us and we need to reinforce the need for education in internet marketing and encourage the progress of certification programs.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Myths & Misconceptions that the Best SEOs Rank at the Top of a Google Search for SEO

While it's very hard to convince some people otherwise, with the exception of top level SEO consultants, the results for "SEO" at Google are substandard. Even SEOToday was ironically not listed on the first page of Google on October 16, 2010, and several of the United States Top SEOs were not listed within the first 3 pages of Google. Why not? SEO considers the company, branding, messaging, and positioning statements. SEO consultants look to identify keywords and phrases that not only increase visibility, but also increase the probability of conversions (leads or sales). This request intensive keyword researches both quantitative and qualitative data usually in the form of web analytics, keyword tools and customer feedback. SEO starts with keyword research, which leads to an understanding of your client’s goals, objectives, strategies, and target audience.

This is a job for an SEO or SEM agency, not for a web design firm. In some cases, web design firms can provide most businesses with a title, keywords, and descriptions; however, the lack of expertise or human resources to allocate time and applied knowledge to keyword research, conversion optimization, keyword ranking monitoring, crawling issues, continuous on-page optimization and link building for a campaign can be detrimental. In general, their area of expertise is in creativity, user experience, and developing great user interfaces, not developing or enhancing a site for search engines. There is an evident difference, one is more creative and one is more research-oriented or analytical. You would not ask an artist to analyze and diagnose your businesses financial statements, would you?

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Why Is Link Building Important to Businesses?

When a prospective customer enters a query into a search engine, the search engine needs to determine how to return the best results. Effective link building assists in the development of the link profile of the site and the web pages being evaluated. The links to the web page are like a vote of "relevance" for the web page. Basically, if your competitor has an equally relevant page for a given search term or keyword, your web page with a better inbound link profile will rank higher than your competitor page.

This will allow your business to reallocate marketing dollars and efforts to other search terms. It may also reduce the cost of your current search engine marketing campaign by improving your organic (non paid) search results for keywords critical to sales and lead generation. No Search Engine Optimization project is complete without Link Building.

Article Submissions: Valuable for SEO or Not?

The general purpose of an article submission is to increase the links to your website(s). If utilized effectively, article submission can help you increase the number of links; however, it is not the most effective method. Many article submission sites have limitations with regards to the type of information that can be displayed within an article. Article Submission can help to establish you or your organization as an industry expert. If you provide an article on a specific topic, there is a good chance that someone interested in that industry will come across it on the web and use it. Remember that relevant content is key when on the web. To maintain this relevance, be sure to include your username, keywords, content, your address, company name, phone number, and contact person for each and every article submission.

Link Building Tips

Search engines place a high value on links from quality sites and use these links as part of their algorithms to determine how high in the rankings a site will appear. For this reason, it is a crucial part of the overall SEO effort.

We recommend the following methods for link building:

1. Ask webmasters to post direct links to pages of relevant content.

2. Offer webmasters text-based content with embedded links for inclusion on their own sites.

3. Requests upgrades of existing for association, affiliates, and partners.

4. Upgrade your directory listings with your URL.